claims

Recently there have been a number of cases where candidates for office have exaggerated their resumes and got caught because so many people take the time to check things out on the Internet. The same is true for those already in office as I know a number of people like myself who look up claims made by politicians. Here is an example of two senators making statements about their proposed legislation and I decided to do a few calculations.



Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) found many reasons to gloat after getting the 74-page study that showed the overall costs from their legislation’s major global warming provisions would cost an average household between $80 to $150 per year.

“There’ll be some people who will want to demagogue that politically, but that’s less than $1 a day,” Lieberman told reporters. “Is the American household willing to pay less than $1 so we don’t have to buy oil from foreign countries, so we can create millions of new jobs, so we can clean up our environment? I think the answer is going to be yes.”


We currently import 4 billion barrels of oil per year and at the current price of $70 that comes to the tidy sum of $280 billion. There are 112 families in the US so the annual cost per family is $2,500 or $6.84 per day per family. Now this is six times more than what Lieberman says and I would be willing to pay that to get rid of all imported oil, but since these senators have come up with this misleading information I am concerned about everything else they say about their bill.

It has become increasingly difficult to get accurate information out of the government officials. As more and more people learn to check out claims by using data collected on line it is going to be more difficult for these politicians to make blanket statements and expect people to take them at their word. I know I certainly don’t and I have friends who check things out like I do.